BROOKLYN, NY May 12—In response to the murder of 25-year-old Black worker Ahmaud Arbery (25) in Georgia, 20 PL’ers and antiracists organized a caravan for communism. Fists rose in solidarity along a 2.2 mile route that revisited time-honored sites of protest and rebellion against the police murders of Kyam Livingston (37), Shantel Davis (23), and Kimani Gray (16). While maintaining working-class discipline, Progressive Labor Party managed to distribute 100 CHALLENGEs and bring the message of antiracism to this neighborhood terrorized by racist police.
Black workers key
Today, as 400 years ago, Black workers are the most brutally attacked section of our class. The police, descendants of slave catchers, enforce this daily terror. That’s because racism, especially anti-Black racism, is part and parcel of capitalism. The profit system cannot function without it.
 U.S. history is a chronicle of genocide, slavery, segregation, and enduring racist oppression. Black workers have less invested in this capitalist status quo. Since racism infects all relations within the profit system, they stand to hold fewer illusions about “justice” or “democracy” under the bosses’ dictatorship. The ruling class understands the revolutionary and historical role of Black workers as leaders of building an international communist movement. Black workers are a key revolutionary force because of their basis for class consciousness—for class solidarity with all workers and class hatred of all capitalist rulers.
This capitalist world will not cease to terrorize and murder our class’s future leaders. Whenever and wherever they terrorize, workers must rise, under all conditions, to fight this system.
Positive neighborhood response
“If you hate this racist system then honk your horn!”  “If you feel the power of the workers then honk your horn!”
These chants from a car-mounted bullhorn echoed through streets growing less deserted by the day as workers forced to earn a living outside their homes returned home from the job. Bus drivers, FedEx and other postal workers, were hailed and responded with their horns as well.
As always, Progressive Labor Party urged the working class to take pride that it is our class keeping this world running and to focus our anger on the ruling class. It’s the bosses’ thirst for profits that is driving us to early graves by the hundreds and thousands a day. We passed Brookdale Hospital where the heroic efforts of workers, mainly Black women, have kept precious brothers and sisters alive despite Governor Andrew Cuomo’s racist neglect over many years.
We contrasted his cynical call for unity since this pandemic commenced with the kind of revolutionary communist working class unity that will sweep misleaders like him and the pestilent system he fronts for into the dustbin of history. Workers can see today more clearly that our class’s work is what contributes all that is essential; it is up to communists to build the organization that the workers need to construct a society that abolishes the profit motive and the bosses’ need to use racism to divide and conquer the working class. You need a revolutionary communist party to do that.
Multiracial unity
The rulers fear nothing more than a multiracial resistance. For well over three centuries, the ruling class have used their state apparatus—their laws, their courts, their banks, their killer cops—to maintain institutionalized racism and segregate workers. False divisions based on skin tones are exploited to spread fear and distrust between workers. So when we can fight with multiracial unity, all workers stand to benefit.
Our multiracial and intergenerational group of PL’ers was joined by old friends from Kyam’s family, co-workers, new friends active in the rent-strike movement in NYC and we finished our journey in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the epicenter of liberal deBlasio’s regime of racist police enforcement of social distancing violations. Of forty summonses given for violating social distancing since the quarantine began in Brooklyn thirty five have been issued in Black neighborhoods (NYT, 5/7).
Awareness that this pandemic only intensifies the capitalist system’s vicious racism ran deep along our 2.2 mile route and fed all of our determination to keep the multiracial struggle for a communist world rolling. Profits will never solve the problems of the workers upon whose backs these problems are created in the first place. Join the fight for an antiracist world, communism.